LITERACY AND LANGUAGE DIFFICULTIES IN SCHOOL-AGED CHILDREN

Speech-language pathologists (S-LPs) play a significant role assessing and treating language difficulties in school-aged children. A child’s knowledge of language is necessary to support school and social success.

If your child is experiencing a language disorder they may have difficulty with:

• Learning new words
• Understanding questions or instructions
• Remembering story plots and details
• Explaining their ideas or academic concepts
• Telling a story
• Forming grammatical sentences
• Matching sounds to letters
• Reading
• Writing and Spelling

How Can a Speech-Language Pathologist Help?

An S-LP plays a very important role in ensuring that your child reaches their potential for adequate school, home and social communication. An S-LP can assess your child’s language, reading and writing, and the cognitive skills underlying language skills, such as verbal memory (e.g. memory for instructional language).

S-LP therapy will support your child in:

• Developing age-appropriate grammatical structures
• Improving their ability to verbally explain ideas and stories
• Improving their ability to understand words, instructions and stories
• Developing age-appropriate reading and writing skills